When Parties Matter: The Conditional Influence of

Party Positions on Voter Opinions about European

Integration

Leonard Ray
Louisiana State University

While the literature on public support for European integration often suggests that political elites play
an important role in shaping public attitudes toward the European Union, the empirical findings to
date reveal an inconsistent pattern of political effects. The causal direction of this relationship has
also been questioned. Using data from the Eurobarometer surveys, this article tests hypotheses to
explain national, partisan, and individual-level variations in the strength of the party/voter connec-
tion. The results of a nonrecursive model demonstrate that party positions do influence electorate
opinion, but that this effect varies with levels of disagreement among parties, party unity, issue
salience, and party attachment. These results help to explain when and where political parties will
exercise the greatest influence over public opinion.

Early research on European integration often described a process insulated

from public opinion by the obscurity of intergovernmental negotiation and an
elite consensus in favor of integration. With the expansion of the scope of EU
policymaking, European integration has become more controversial and salient.
The concomitant increase in treaty revisions, with their attendant referenda, gives
public opinion a powerful direct role in constraining the future development of
the EU.
A number of authors writing on public support for European integration have
argued that political elites exert a formative leadership over mass opinion.
Hypothesized political influences have been found by some studies, and rejected
by others, giving rise to ad hoc speculation about the conditional nature of polit-
ical effects. This article will evaluate several arguments found in the literature on
public support for European integration as well as theories drawn from the psy-
chological literature on persuasion. The results indicate the conditions under
which political parties can be vital factors in shaping public opinion.1

1
Even if parties sometimes act strategically in response to public opinion, the direction of influ-
ence can run in the opposite direction, an idea evident even to the writers who first propounded the
model of political parties as “vote seekers” (see Downs 1957, 234 and Schumpeter 1942, 227). Polit-
ical parties would be interested in shaping public opinion if politicians care about policy out-

THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS, Vol. 65, No. 4, November 2003, Pp. 978–994
© 2003 Southern Political Science Association
 When Parties Matter 979

Political persuasion was a prime suspect in the earliest literature on European

integration, although the evidence was mixed. Early research by Inglehart (1970)
identified the charismatic Euroskepticism of Charles De Gaulle as an influence on
French support for the European Community, but he found little supporting evi-
dence outside of France, and he wrote in 1971 that issues of integration “transcend”
party cleavages (Inglehart 1971, 26). Five years later, Wilgden and Feld (1976) con-
cluded that voter perceptions of party positions were influential, but of limited
impact because of the large prointegration consensus among European elites.
The question of elite effects on opinion was revisited in the 1990s. Janssen
urged that research “be directed at the role political elites play in teaching the
public what to think about it” (1991, 468). Evidence from the 1989 European
Elections Study indicates that the opinions of party electorates are generally
related to the positions taken by parties (Van der Eijk and Franklin 1991). A
seminal piece on the economic determinants of EU support endorsed the search
for political influences concluding that “political campaigns, elite actions, and
the international environment can independently move public opinion.” (Eichen-
berg and Dalton 1993, 530).
The most recent research on political effects presents a mixed picture. Research
on referenda campaigns indicates that supporters of incumbent parties do gener-
ally support the EU, although this effect varies according to the institutional char-
acteristics of the referenda (Hug and Sciarini 2000). However, Duch and Taylor
find no such connection outside of the context of referenda (1997, 75). Gabel
(1998) finds significant effects for class partisanship and incumbent support,
although the magnitude, and in one case, direction, of these effects change over
time. Anderson finds strong national variation in incumbency effects (Anderson
1998).
One difficulty in drawing a firm conclusion from this literature is the wide
variety of ways in which political effects have been conceptualized and meas-
ured. Authors have used the general ideological orientations of parties as proxies,2
assumed that governing parties naturally favor integration by virtue of their
incumbency,3 or used voter’s perceptions of party positions.4 All of the afore-
mentioned work used recursive models, which are called into question by
Carubba (2001) who argued that at least part of the correlation between party
positions and voter opinions is due to the strategic responses of political parties
to the opinions of likely supporters. While Carubba’s nonrecursive model
predicting party positions did not rule out the possibility that parties influence
their own supporters, it clearly demonstrated the need to take the potential for
reciprocal causation seriously.

comes. The “policy seeking” party or politician has been a staple of the literature on coalition for-
mation and avoidance (Laver and Schofield 1990), interparty politics (Bruce, Clark, and Kessel 1991),
and electoral competition (Hill and Hurley 1999).
2
See Gabel 1998 and Inglehart and Rabier 1978.
3
See Anderson 1998, Duch and Taylor 1987, and Gabel 1998.
4
See Wilgden and Feld 1976.
980 Leonard Ray

In this article, I suggest that the mixed pattern of results in the literature occurs
because elite influence is conditional, and the magnitude of this effect will vary
across time, space, and individuals. This article moves beyond the existing liter-
ature empirically by examining the influence of partisan cues at four points
in time, demonstrating the independence of the results from events such as
European elections and referenda. It also employs interval-level measures of
party positions, which provide a more accurate indicator than the commonly used
dichotomies of bourgeois vs. proletarian or incumbent vs. opposition. Finally, by
estimating a nonrecursive model using a two-stage least-squares approach, I can
exclude the possibility that the observed relationship between party position and
electorate opinion is a result of strategic position taking by political parties.

Hypotheses
I argue that while parties can influence individual-level opinion, this effect will
be conditional. The literature in political science and psychology suggests a
number of factors that may enhance or attenuate the persuasiveness of political
parties. In the literature on European integration, the absence of consistent polit-
ical effects is alternately attributed to the low salience of the issue of integration,
to internal party divisions, and/or to a prointegration elite consensus. The
psychological work on persuasion suggests a number of characteristics that
make some individuals more receptive to a persuasive message including source
credibility and psychological involvement with the topic.
The issue importance hypothesis draws upon theories of party competition that
posit that parties choose the degrees to which they emphasize each issue. The
“saliency theory” of party competition propounded by Budge and Farlie (1983)
asserts that political parties build their public appeal around those issues where
they have the support of a majority of the electorate and downplay or ignore other
issues. Similarly, “directional theory” presumes that issues represent a choice
between two sides of a question and that parties choose the degree of emphasis
to place on each issue (Listhaug, Macdonald, and Rabinowitz 1990; Rabinowitz
and Macdonald 1989). Both of these theories suggest that the salience of an issue
will vary across parties. My first hypothesis is that the influence a party’s posi-
tion on the issue of European integration will have upon voter’s opinions increases
as the importance of the issue of European integration to the party increases.
One of the prime suspects in recent discussions of the weakness of party-voter
linkages on the issue of European integration is internal party dissent. European
parties are often depicted as rife with internal divisions on European issues often
due to the mismatch between the cleavage systems that gave rise to parties and
the new issue of European unification (Bogdanor 1989; Van der Eijk and Franklin
1996). Disagreement within parties about the correct position to take on
European integration can be expected to weaken the ability of a party to influ-
ence the opinions of its electorate. The presentation of contradictory messages
by various party leaders will muddle the cues sent by the party to its supporters.
 When Parties Matter 981

Cues will be muffled as well if internal party divisions deter a party from public
discussion of European issues. The party unity hypothesis holds that the influ-
ence of party positions on voter opinions will increase as party unity on this issue
increases.
Another culprit often blamed for attenuating the relationship between parti-
sanship and support for the EU is a supposed elite consensus in favor of inte-
gration. Duch and Taylor cite elite consensus as the culprit behind their inability
to identify incumbency effects (1997, 78). Conversely, Slater (1982) attributed
the politicization of European issues in the “new” member states of the 1970s to
the activity of counter elites who broke with the prevailing pro-EU consensus.
The literature suggesting that a consensus among political parties suppresses the
politicization of the issue of European integration provides the elite consensus
hypothesis that the effect of party positions in each nation will increase as the
variation in positions taken by political parties of that nation increases.
One factor often identified in the psychological literature on communication
is the perceived credibility of the source.5 Communications research often dis-
tinguishes between two distinct facets of credibility. The first component of cred-
ibility is a cognitive one, which indicates the degree to which recipients of a
communication view the source as providing accurate information. The second
aspect of credibility involves the positive affect recipients have for the source of
the communication.6 For the present analysis, there is no readily available data
on the perceived accuracy of the various political parties precluding an analysis
of the “cognitive” credibility of each potential source. The data do, however,
permit an estimation of the affective component of credibility. The affective
credibility hypothesis predicts the effect of party positions will be an increasing
function of the strength of party attachment.
Another individual attribute which I expect will mediate the effect of partisan
cues is interest in and attention to political matters. An awareness of the posi-
tions of parties would seem the sine qua non of political persuasion. Zaller (1992)
has shown that those individuals who pay the most attention to the media will
react first to shifts in elite opinion. Research in psychology has also found that
involvement in a topic can, under some conditions, increase persuadability (Petty
and Cacioppo 1979).7 I argue that the political interest measure used here, polit-
ical discussion, taps into interest in and exposure to political information, but
5
Because the same political party will not be equally credible for all of its supporters, credibility
is not a global characteristic of the source, but varies across recipients of the party cues.
6
The terminology varies and I follow Chebat, Filiatrault, and Perrien (1990) in distinguishing
between cognitive and affective credibility, instead of using the labels “qualification” and “safety”
credibility (Rogers and Bhowmik 1970) or “expertise” and “trustworthiness” credibility (Sternthal,
Phillips and Dholakia 1978).
7
Under some conditions interest and involvement may decrease persuadability (Cobb and
Kuklinski 1997). The controversy hinges on the meaning of “involvement” (Johnson and Eagly 1989,
1990). “Outcome relevant” involvement refers to issues of personal relevance and increases one’s
motivation to process and accept a persuasive message. “Value relevant” involvement decreases per-
suadability because of the subject’s emotional attachment to the attitude in question.
982 Leonard Ray

does not reflect an emotional attachment to one’s attitude about the EU. As meas-
ured, political discussion should increase the potential for persuasion by politi-
cal parties. My political interest hypothesis is that the effects of party positions
will be strongest for those individuals who are interested in and attentive to polit-
ical matters.

Data and Methods

The issue of European integration lends itself to a test of the hypotheses pre-
sented above. By examining the same political issue in multiple national contexts
with comparable cross-national data one can evaluate the influence of national
context on the party-voter relationship. The multiparty political systems of most
European nations allow for an examination of party level effects. The Euro-
barometer surveys provide indicators of individual-level characteristics such as
political interest and closeness to parties, as well as a measure of the dependent
variable, support for European integration. The data on party positions is taken
from an expert survey described below which provides measures for four years,
1984, 1988, 1992, and 1996. The Eurobarometer data used are drawn from
surveys # 21, 22, 29, 30, 37, 38, and 44.2 bis which correspond to the years of
the expert survey data.8 The operationalization of each variable is described
briefly below. Detailed information about question wording is presented in an
appendix.
The dependent variable, support for European integration, is measured using
an additive index of responses to two survey questions. The first question asks
respondents to evaluate “efforts being made to unify” Europe; the second asks
for an evaluation of “your country’s membership” in the European Union. These
two questions are workhorses of the European integration literature, and this addi-
tive index has been used by a number of previous studies (Gabel 1998; Janssen
1991; Nelsen, Guth, and Fraser 2001; Wessels 1995). The technique of consoli-
dating these two questions into one index has been shown to produce a particu-
larly valid indicator of support for European integration (Gabel 1998). See the
appendix for the formula used to construct this index.9
Data on party positions are drawn from an expert survey conducted in 1996
which provides estimates of the position taken by each party in the European
Union in four different time periods: 1984, 1988, 1992, and 1996. In this survey,
described in detail elsewhere (Ray 1999), experts on European political parties
were asked to evaluate the positions of each political party in their country of
expertise on three separate dimensions. These dimensions were: (1) the overall
position of the party on the issue of integration; (2) the extent of internal dissent

8
I am grateful to the Zentralarchive in Cologne for providing me with a corrected version of
Eurobarometer #29. All other Eurobarometers were provided by ICPSR.
9
Some may question whether a dependent variable with five possible values is actually an ordinal-
level measure. However, the results reported here are robust under reanalysis using multinomial logit.
 When Parties Matter 983

within the party on the issue of integration; and (3) the importance of the issue
to the party. A total of 135 experts responded to the survey, for a mean of eight
respondents per country.10
As a check on the validity of this measure of party positions, the expert survey
indicator for 1988 was compared with two other indicators of party position avail-
able for that same year. Perceived party position is taken from a set of questions
on Eurobarometer # 30 which ask respondents to place each national party on a
scale raging from “very much in favor” of the European Community to “very
much against.” A third indicator is created from the Comparative Manifesto
Project’s content analysis of party platforms. A factor analysis of these three indi-
cators suggests that they are all valid measures of party position, as one factor
can account for 82% of the variance in all three measures. Of the measures, the
expert survey comes closest to the underlying factor, with the highest factor
loading (.948). The high reliability of the expert survey is suggested by the extent
of agreement among different experts. The standard deviation of experts’ judg-
ments was on average only 12% of the scale range, which is comparable to other
expert surveys widely used in political science (see Ray and Narud 2000).
A simple Ordinary Least-Squares regression of voter opinion on party posi-
tions can indicate the degree to which test two are related, but not the direction
of the relationship. In order to estimate the strength of that portion of the corre-
lation that is due to shifts of voter’s opinions (rather than changes in party posi-
tions), I use two staged least-squares to estimate a nonrecursive model. In the
first stage, I predict party positions using a number of independent variables apart
from electorate opinion. In the second stage these predicted party positions,
purged of the component that could be caused by electorate opinion, serve as an
independent variable in my analysis of public opinion.
The predicted party positions used in the second stage of this 2-Stage Least-
Squares analysis are produced by an OLS regression. The independent variables
used in this regression are drawn from previous work on party positions on
European Integration (Marks, Wilson, and Ray 2002). They include a measure of
past cabinet participation,11 an indicator of the party’s position on the left-right
ideological dimension, as well as its extremity on that dimension,12 and a set of
dummy variables for the party’s association with a party family. The results of
this regression analysis are presented in Table 1.
These regression equations provide a reasonable fit to the data on party
positions, with adjusted R2 ranging from .70 (for 1992) to .53 (for 1996). The

10
Experts were drawn primarily from ECPR and APSA membership lists.
11
In an attempt to capture differences between marginal opposition parties which are often excluded
from government and those parties with a recent cabinet experience, cabinet participation is meas-
ured by the number of months each party spent in the government over the preceding five years. This
indicator is logged because in my judgment, cabinet participation has a declining marginal effect on
a party’s inclusion in the political system.
12
Left-right position is based on Hix and Lord (1997); extremity is measured by the squared dis-
tance from the midpoint of their ten-point ideology scale.
984 Leonard Ray

TABLE 1

OLS Regressions Used to Generate Predicted Party Position Used in

the Two-Stage Least-Squares Model
Independent Variables 1984 1988 1992 1996

Cabinet Participation .124 .091 .175** .162

(.112) (.082) (.078) (.104)
Left-Right position .053 .036 -.110 -.008
(.114) (.106) (.111) (.117)
Left-Right extremity -.131** -.134** -.116** -.119**
(.039) (.036) (.032) (.036)
Party Familya
Green .546 .519 .570 .434
(.558) (.515) (.437) (.541)
Agrarian 2.959** 2.710** 3.285** .077
(1.428) (1.322) (1.265) (1.042)
Extreme Right -.417 -.470 .233 -.116
(1.083) (1.003) (.992) (1.055)
Christian Democrat 1.913** 1.920** 2.303** 1.613*
(.813) (.744) (.740) (.883)
Social Democrat 1.402** 1.711** 1.861** 1.728**
(.677) (.608) (.575) (.711)
Conservative .787 .982 1.141 1.038
(.958) (.862) (.867) (.982)
Liberal 1.924** 1.964** 2.238** 1.948**
(.815) (.739) (.728) (.844)
Regional 1.684* 1.740** 2.137** 1.872*
(.882) (.826) (.792) (.950)
Other 1.138 1.130 1.683** .742
(.790) (.731) (.800) (.826)
Constant 3.983** 4.207** 4.576** 4.309**
(.677) (.624) (.567) (.636)
Adjusted R Square .612 .653 .702 .532
Number of Observations 83 83 87 110
F Statistic 12** 14** 18** 11**

a
Reference party family is the Communist/Radical Left.
* = p < .10; ** = p < .05.

predicted party positions on the issue of European integration are then mapped
onto respondents according to their party preferences. Party preference is meas-
ured by the standard Eurobarometer question, “If there were a general election
tomorrow, which party would you vote for?” This variable is used to predict
support for European integration both as a stand-alone independent variable and
as a component of five interaction terms.
To test the elite consensus hypothesis, the standard deviation of party positions
in each nation is used as an indicator of the extent of cross-party variation on
 When Parties Matter 985

the issue of European integration.13 Two party-level factors, unity and issue
importance, are hypothesized to reinforce the ability of parties to influence the
opinions of their supporters. Measures of issue importance and of party unity are
both derived from the expert survey described above. The two individual-level
factors hypothesized to influence the effectiveness of party cues are attentiveness
to political matters and strength of attachment to the preferred party. Party attach-
ment was measured using the Eurobarometer question “Do you consider yourself
close to any political party?” Political interest is indicated using a Eurobarome-
ter question about the frequency of political discussion. As indicated above, there
is the risk that these individuals have strongly held opinions which are not easily
shifted by persuasive appeals, and this indicator is a rather blunt instrument.
Unlike the alternative measures, this question has the advantage of inclusion in
all of the Eurobarometer surveys analyzed here.
Several other individual-level characteristics have been shown to affect opinion
about European integration and are included as controls. Cross-national differ-
ences in opinion towards European integration are well documented, and a vector
of country dummies is included to capture these effects. Recent work by Gabel
(1998) has identified “human capital” as a particularly strong predictor of indi-
vidual opinions about the EU.14 In fact, Gabel concludes that the substantive effect
of human-capital factors is much greater than any other set of theoretical meas-
ures, including partisanship. His primary measures of human capital, education,
occupational status, and income are included. Other work has highlighted the
existence of a “gender gap” in support for the EU (Nelsen and Guth 2000), and
a dummy variable for gender is included.

Analyses and Results

Data from the spring and fall Eurobarometers for 1984, 1988, 1992, and the
spring Eurobarometer for 1996 were used to create four datasets, one for each
year. For each year, the index of support for European integration was regressed
on a set of independent variables including five interaction terms which model
the conditional effect of party cues. Each interaction term is coded so that the
hypotheses predict a positive regression parameter.15 The regression analysis
includes a parameter for the predicted party positions generated in the first stage
of the 2SLS process, as well as parameters for the five variables used to create
the interaction terms to ensure that any observed interaction effects are not the
spurious effects of the national, party, and individual-level factors hypothesized
to mediate the influence of party cues. The demographic and national control

13
A standard deviation is calculated for each of the years analyzed using the actual party positions.
14
Human capital consists of intangible assets such as skills or education which better equip indi-
viduals to withstand or to profit from the increased competition expected to result from European
integration.
15
The measure of party unity is simply six minus the measure of internal party dissent.
986 Leonard Ray

TABLE 2

Regressing Public Support for Integration on Party Positions

Interacted with Party Characteristics and National Context. Two-Stage
Least-Squares Results, Standard Error in Parenthesis
Independent Variables Used to Predict
Individual Level EU Support 1984 1988 1992 1996

Interaction of Predicted Party Position:

With Issue Importance to Party 2.661*** 4.950*** 1.609*** 1.869***
(.642) (.705) (.544) (.302)
With Party Unity (6 – Party Dissent) 5.467*** 2.265*** .679 3.838***
(.603) (.515) (.517) (.291)
With Variation in Party Positions 2.119*** 1.087** 1.984*** .886***
(.732) (.544) (.581) (.312)
With Closeness to Party .804*** 1.280*** 1.543*** .966***
(.241) (.222) (.241) (.124)
With Political Discussion .796** 1.324*** .157 .692***
(.340) (.307) (.371) (.187)
Baseline effects for Interactions
Effect of Predicted Party Position -35.956*** -26.638*** -8.567*** -22.361***
(3.381) (3.218) (2.818) (1.838)
Issue Importance to Party -9.662** -27.555*** -14.767*** -8.854***
(3.887) (4.293) (3.160) (1.519)
Party Unity (6 – Party Dissent) 29.968*** 16.466*** 5.493** 20.067***
(2.966) (2.794) (2.593) (1.570)
Variation in Party Positions -15.936*** 10.317 -11.289** -5.047**
(4.520) (13.402) (5.751) (2.255)
Political Discussion -2.031 -3.929** 2.165 -1.100
(1.916) (1.776) 2.129 (1.040)
Closeness to Party -3.287** -5.672*** -7.926*** -3.749***
(1.358) (1.289) (1.381) (.685)

Control Variables

Socio-Economic Controls
Gender -.814** -2.863*** -1.541*** -1.562***
(.456) (.416) (.544) (.295)
High Occupational Status 4.199*** 2.272*** .476 2.986***
(1.076) (.844) (1.159) (.452)
Income .732*** 1.422*** .933*** 1.723***
(.220) (.194) (.256) (.157)
Low Education -3.400*** -2.357*** -3.425*** -4.228***
(.545) (.509) (.655) (.371)
High Education 2.047*** 3.357*** 4.590*** 5.870***
(.651) (.552) (.689) (.366)
National Controls
(Belgium = reference)
Denmark -26.205*** -39.961*** -8.811* a
(1.962) (12.306) (4.550)
France 2.624** -9.322 .747 2.539**
(1.229) 6.582 (3.136) (1.099)
 When Parties Matter 987

TABLE 2 continued

Control Variables 1984 1988 1992 1996

Germany a -23.507 .474 -.487

14.781 (4.124) (1.131)
Greece -10.016*** -10.372 11.405* 8.347***
(1.644) 13.586 (5.895) (1.673)
Ireland -6.425** a 8.460** 18.298***
(3.012) (3.778) (1.588)
Italy 3.604*** 1.367 8.359*** 17.034***
(1.204) 3.870 (2.005) (.939)
Luxembourg 4.912 -12.467 a 10.355**
(5.971) 12.668 (4.880)
The Netherlands 7.972*** -6.428 -.449 9.804***
(1.286) 7.741 (2.165) (1.033)
United Kingdom -16.802*** -13.714*** -6.552*** -5.783***
(1.937) 3.987 (2.390) (.942)
Portugal — -1.660 19.637*** 9.854***
10.853 (3.206) (1.199)
Spain — 14.538*** 10.746*** 5.591***
4.840 (2.991) (1.160)
Austria — — — -13.203***
(2.148)
Finland — — — -8.504***
(1.687)
Sweden — — — -6.149***
(1.458)
Intercept 80.983*** 114.159*** 107.912*** 47.031***
(14.338) (22.257) (14.039) (5.681)
Adjusted R Square .167 .179 .117 .127
Number of Observations 9674 12222 8840 34618
F Statistic 89*** 104*** 46*** 174***

a
Country dummy omitted to prevent multicollinearity with national level variables.
* = p < .10; ** = p < .05; *** = p < .01.

variables described above are included.16 The results of this analysis are presented
in Table 2.
The results indicate that political parties do affect public opinion about
European integration and that this effect is not an artifact produced by strategic
16
The inclusion of a variable which is constant for all respondents from the same nation (variation
in party positions) along with national dummy variables creates an identification problem. In order
to estimate the model, a second national dummy must be excluded from each regression. In order to
identify an appropriate national dummy for omission, a regression equation was estimated for each
year using only the national dummy variables, with Belgium as the reference group. The national
dummy with the smallest parameter (in absolute terms) for each year was omitted from the full-regres-
sion equation for that year, as these respondents differed least from the Belgian ones.
988 Leonard Ray

position taking by parties. The effect of party positions is, however, conditional.
In all four years analyzed, all five of the interaction terms are positive, as
expected. The results strongly support the first hypothesis—that parties are much
more persuasive when the issue at hand is an important one. This suggests that
the “saliency” and “directional” theories of party competition described above
apply to the issue of European integration. The relative strength of this parame-
ter prior to 1992 may indicate that as issues of European integration become more
salient in general, differences across parties begin to lose some of their effect.
There is also support for the second hypothesis which identified unity as a
factor which could enhance the persuasiveness of a party. The interaction with
party unity is significant in three years, though it dips well below the level
required for statistical significance in 1992. This decline in the role of party unity
in 1992 is suggestive. 1992 saw the first round of referenda to ratify the Treaty
on European Union, and this process raised the salience of European issues across
the continent. Referenda were held that year in two member states where parties
were internally divided over European issues (Denmark and France). If referenda
tend to increase the persuasive power of political parties, then this effect could
have compensated for the reduced internal cohesion of the French and Danish
parties.
The third hypothesis, which predicted that party positions would influence
opinion more strongly as national-level variation in party positions increased, is
also strongly supported by these results. In all four years, the effect of party posi-
tions is significantly greater when parties take a variety of positions on the issue
of European integration.
The fourth hypothesis predicted that the closer individuals feel to the political
party they support, the more they will be affected by the positions taken by that
party. Here also there are positive and significant parameters across the board.
This set of interaction terms also has the least temporal variation across the four
years analyzed, suggesting that this effect is not particularly sensitive to changes
in the political context.
Finally, the fifth hypothesis is also generally supported by these results. The
parameter for the interaction with political discussion is always positive and is
highly significant in 1984, 1988, and 1996. However, like the interaction with
party unity, this term plunges in magnitude and loses significance for 1992. As
was mentioned above, political awareness could be expected to enhance per-
suadability if it implies simply a greater likelihood of receiving political cues.
Conversely, it would decrease persuasion if awareness is associated with the
holding of firm opinions. As overall awareness about the European Union spiked
in 1992, the degree to which politically aware individuals hold strong opinions
on European issues may have also increased, bringing a countervailing effect to
bear on the effectiveness of party cues.
While these results tell us about the contingent nature of political influence,
what do they say about the overall substantive impact of party positions? The
parameter for party position is not directly interpretable because it represents the
 When Parties Matter 989

influence party positions would have on individual opinions in the hypothetical

(and impossible) event that the values on all five interaction terms were zero. For
any individual, the influence of party position on the opinions of that individual
is the sum of the baseline parameter for party position, plus the effects of the five
interaction terms.17 The substantive magnitude of the effect of party position is
meaningful if one considers the predicted effects for specific hypothetical cases.
Using the mean values of the contextual variables and the parameters from the
regression equation (from Table 2), we can compute the effect of party position
on the opinions of the “average” respondent for each year. This estimated average
effect of party position is .18 for 1984, 3.18 for 1984, 5.67 for 1992, and 2.97
for 1996. In substantive terms, for such a “typical” respondent, a shift on party
position over the range of possible positions (from 1 to 7) would result in an
increase in support of 1.08 in 1984, of 19.08 in 1988, of 34.02 in 1992, and of
17.82 in 1996. After 1984, this mean effect of party positions is significantly
larger that the effects of the socioeconomic control variables.18
The nonrecursive model presented above was used in order to exclude to pos-
sibility that the effects I refer to as persuasion are actually artifacts of strategic
position taking by political parties. However, if voters select political parties
based on the parties’ positions on European integration, then voters will agree
with the party they support even if neither the parties nor the voters have altered
their stances on the issue, a possibility the nonrecursive model cannot rule out.
Distinguishing between persuasion and issue voting requires panel data which
reveal the voters’ party preferences and opinions at two points in time. For
example, studies based on such data have found that persuasion was more
common than policy voting during the Nordic referenda on EU accession in 1994
(Jenssen, Pesonen, and Gilljam 1998). Unfortunately, no such panel data are
available for the European Union as a whole.
It is possible to eliminate the potential effects of short-term policy voting by
restricting the analysis to respondents with stable party preferences. The data are
admittedly not ideal. The only way to measure the stability of a voter’s partisan-
ship is to compare the party they would vote for “if a general election were held
tomorrow” with the party they recall voting for at the last general election.
Because the recalled vote question was not asked systematically prior to Euro-
barometer # 30, this approach cannot be applied prior to the fall survey from
1988. Because of the dramatic changes in the Italian party system in 1992, this
technique is also difficult to operationalize for the Italian case which must be
dropped from the analysis of 1992. Finally recalled vote is also clearly inferior
to a contemporaneous report of an individual’s preferences. Despite these
17
The formula for the estimated effect of party position is: EFFECT = b1 (IMPORTANCE) + b2
(UNITY) + b3 (VARIATION) + b4 (CLOSENESS) + b5 (DISCUSSION) + b6, where the betas refer to the
regression parameters in the order they appear in Table 2.
18
A corresponding shift from the lowest to the highest values on income, education, and status,
would result in an increase in support of only 11.192 in 1984, 12.271 in 1988, 10.965 in 1992, and
16.241 in 1996.
990 Leonard Ray

limitations, the replication of the two-stage least-squares results using only those
respondents with stable party preferences is a worthwhile test of the robustness
of the findings reported above.
The pattern of effects is remarkably similar to the results for the full set of
respondents.19 The parameters for the interaction with issue importance and party
attachment are consistently positive and significant. The parameters for the party
unity and political-discussion interactions keep their substantial positive effects,
although their p values drop below statistical significance for 1992. The one
marked difference between these results and the full set of respondents is that the
interaction with variation in party positions drops in substantive magnitude and
loses significance for 1992. This may indicate that the dispersion of party posi-
tions plays a more important role in encouraging policy voting than in the process
of persuasion.

Discussion
The position taken by a political party on the issue of European integration
can act as a cue for supporters of that party. However, the strength of this effect
varies significantly according to characteristics of the party, of the national
context, and of the individual party supporter. Of the factors hypothesized to
enhance the persuasiveness of political parties, issue importance to the party and
an individual’s attachment to a party were clearly shown to influence the strength
of the connection between party positions and voter opinion. Hypotheses about
party unity and political discussion were also supported by the results for three
of the four years studied, with a drop in magnitude and significance in 1992 which
could be a result of the particular political context in Europe that year. The results
from the full sample of respondents also strongly supported the elite consensus
hypothesis, although the analysis of stable partisans suggests that elite consen-
sus may act to discourage policy voting rather than to reduce persuasiveness.
While four time periods are clearly insufficient for a definitive statistical analy-
sis of temporal effects, the results are suggestive. 1992 stands out as a high water
mark for party influence. The great public visibility of European integration in a
year which saw acrimonious debate over the ratification of the Treaty on Euro-
pean Union is the obvious explanation for the increase in party effects in 1992.
In addition, the sudden decline in the mediating effect of party unity in 1992 sug-
gests that when the issue of European integration is particularly salient, parties
get their messages out regardless of their internal divisions.
These results suggest that inconsistencies in the previous literature on politi-
cal influences on public support for European integration may reflect the condi-
tional nature of party cues. The findings suggest that the course of aggregate
public support for European integration will be contingent on developments

19
These results are omitted in the interest of space. They are available from the author.
 When Parties Matter 991

in the party systems of Europe. The appearance of Euroskeptical parties in

European party systems should increase the impact of party cues by increasing
the distinctiveness of party messages, increasing support for the EU among the
adherents of pro-EU parties while simultaneously increasing opposition among
their own supporters. Thus the net effect of a small Euroskeptical party could
well be an increase in overall levels of support for the EU. Though the days of
elite-level bargaining insulated from public opinion by a “permissive consensus”
seem to be over, the fate of the European Union still lies in the hands of the
political leadership of Europe.

Appendix

Dependent Variable
The dependent variable is an additive index of the following two Eurobarom-
eter survey questions:
Q1 “In general, are you for or against efforts being made to unify Western
Europe?”
3. For—very much; 2. For—to some extent; 1. Against—to some extent; 0.
Against—very much
Q2 “Generally speaking, do you think that your country’s membership of the
European Community is a good thing?”
2. Good thing; 1. Neither good nor bad; 0. Bad thing
The index of support is scaled to range from 0 to 100.
Support = (Q1 + Q2) * 20.

Independent Variables
The measures of party position, issue importance, and internal party dissent
are drawn from an expert survey described in Ray (1999). These variables are
coded as follows:
Party Position is indicated by the mean response of experts to the following
query:
The overall orientation of the party leadership toward European integration:
1 = Strongly opposed to European integration
2 = Opposed to European integration
3 = Somewhat opposed to European integration
4 = Neutral, no stance on the issue of European integration
5 = Somewhat in favor of European integration
6 = In favor of European integration
7 = Strongly in favor of European Integration
Issue Importance is indicated by experts’ responses using the following scale:
The relative importance of this issue in the party’s public stance:
992 Leonard Ray

1 = European Integration is of no importance, never mentioned by the party

2 = European Integration is a minor issue for the party
3 = European Integration is an important issue for the party
4 = European Integration is one of the most important issues for the party
5 = European Integration is the most important issue for the party
Internal Dissent is measured as follows:
The degree of dissent within the party over the party leadership’s position:
1 = Complete unity
2 = Minor dissent
3 = Significant dissent
4 = Party evenly split on issue
5 = Leadership position opposed by a majority of party activists
Inter-Party Disagreement is indicated by the standard deviation of party posi-
tions for each nation/year.
Party Closeness is based upon the following Eurobarometer question:
“Do you consider yourself to be close to any political party? If so, do you feel
yourself to be very close to this party, fairly close or merely a sympathiser?”
3. Very close; 2. Fairly close; 1. Merely a sympathiser; 0. Close to no partic-
ular party
Political Engagement is indicated by the Eurobarometer question about dis-
cussion of political issues.
“When you get together with your friends, would you say you discuss politi-
cal matters frequently, occasionally or never?”
3. Frequently; 2. Occasionally; 1. Never

Control Variables
Female is a dummy variable for sex coded 1 if the respondent is female,
0 otherwise.
High Occupational Status is coded 1 if the respondent is a professional, exec-
utive, or business owner.
Low Education is a dummy variable coded 1 if the respondent left school at
the age of 15 or earlier.
High Education is a dummy variable coded 1 if the respondent left school at
or after the age of 20.
Income is the respondent’s income quartile, where 1 indicates the lowest quar-
tile, and 4 the highest. Note that nonrespondents are recoded as being at the
median income level (2.5).

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Chris Anderson, Kathleen Bratton, James Garand, Michael
Licari, and Marco Steenbergen, as well as the anonymous reviewers of the JOP
for their useful criticism and advice. I am also grateful to Meinhard Moschner
 When Parties Matter 993

of the Zentralarchiv in Cologne for providing the corrected data for Eurobarom-
eter #29.

Manuscript submitted 19 January 2001

Final manuscript received 2 August 2002

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Leonard Ray is assistant professor of political science, Louisiana State

University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70803-5433 (lray2@lsu.edu).